Physical Design Overview

Since the early 70’s, physical design has been a crucial part of chip design. Its origin came from the need for obtaining optimum electronic packaging, which involves the placement of components and modules on boards and interconnecting the pins on modules. Most early approaches were by and large empirical and ad. hoc. One major exception is perhaps Lee’s maze router [8], which has proven to be a powerful computational tool for routing. In the late 70’s more analytical tools for layout began to evolve both from industry and the universities. The field of physical design gradually attracted sizeable research interests.